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Money for potholes would feed summer budgets

As lawmakers debate how to spend some of the more than $1 billion in surplus revenue, they will take great pains to explain that at least $100 million will be spent on roads in a supplemental funding bill.

The debate over how much to spend on roads and other items in Senate Bill 608 will be hashed out in a conference committee this week.

While Michigan emerges from a brutal winter and potholes are springing up just about everywhere, motorists are angry and want to see the potholes filled.

But what lawmakers aren't saying is that the bulk of this $100 million will not go to fix the potholes on the roads right now, nor the potholes — or in some cases, craters — that will emerge on highways and local roads next month or the month after.

The Michigan Department of Transportation is filling those potholes right now with money it had budgeted for summer maintenance projects. It blew through its winter maintenance budget in short order because of all of the snow and ice.

So the additional money MDOT would receive from the state would actually be used to backfill its summer maintenance budget so it can repair guardrails, seal cracks in the roads and mow the grass along the highways once all the snow has melted.

Without this money, those summer projects would not get done, MDOT Director Kirk Steudle has said.

If the Legislature does produce the $100 million for the roads, MDOT would receive $39 million and counties would share $39 million, with $22 million given to local units of government.

Denise Donohue, director of the County Road Association of Michigan, estimated that about 80 percent of the counties are faced with the same situation as MDOT. Those counties have also already blown through their winter budgets, and in some cases, their entire annual maintenance budgets, so they would also use the new money to ensure they can do summer maintenance work.

"It's a Band-Aid," she said. "This just brings people back to where they were. And where they were doesn't have much to do with the bunch of potholes that are about to come out."

John LaMacchia, legislative associate for the Michigan Municipal League, said he thinks many of his members would use the funds right away, though there are communities that have burned through their maintenance budgets and have dipped into street funds typically set aside to do road repair and rebuilding work during the construction season.

But regardless of when this money is spent, it's not nearly enough, he said.

"The focus needs to be on the long term," LaMacchia said.

Short term vs. long term

Bill Rustem

The Snyder administration has been fairly hands off in the debate over how much road funding should be included in the supplemental funding bill, in part because it doesn't want this to be seen as a victory, since it is just a short-term solution.

But that time has been spent this year largely behind the scenes talking with lawmakers. While the governor still supports a long-term fix, he did not include it in his budget this year as he did last year. Nor has he mounted the same type of statewide campaign for the funding the way he did then.

But now, unlike last year when the roads were bad, but nowhere near as bad as this winter has made them, the public is on Snyder's side, Rustem said.

"You've got to get to a point where the public completely understands it," Rustem said. "We've clearly turned a corner. The public is understanding that we've got to fix these roads."

The last time the state funded a long-term solution for the roads by raising the gas tax was 1997, and only after the public outcry grew so loud about the conditions of the roads that lawmakers were forced to act. That sentiment was aided in part when Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson posed for a photo while standing in a pothole.

So has the Snyder administration reached out to Patterson and asked him to stand in a pothole again?